You know those moments where you are introduced to a new technology and the only thing you can say is “Holy f**k”? Microsoft Photosynth is one such technology.
Here’s how the Microsoft site describes it:
Our software takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.
With Photosynth you can:
- Walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle.
- Seamlessly zoom in or out of a photo whether it’s megapixels or gigapixels in size.
- See where pictures were taken in relation to one another.
- Find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing.
- Send a collection – or a particular view of one – to a friend.
Yawn, right? We’ve heard about stuff like this for years and it’s never turned out, right? Check out the TED video below to see it in action. More importantly, watch it for the example the speaker gives where he shows what happens when you suck in all the Flickr photos of Notre Dame in Paris and overlap them all, no matter what part of the structure the photo is of and regardless of quality to create a fly-through of the 3-D space. Here’s another example video.
(The only complaint I have is it that it’s currently XP and Vista only. Boo.)
